The forecast for Labour’s conference is set fair in a manner unimaginable at the start of the year, amid the long and sometimes dark transition from one leader to another. The leadership’s opponents inside the party have drifted away and his opponents beyond it are in great confusion.

Look familiar? It should: it was the Guardian’s leader five years ago. Labour headed into the conference season with the wind at its back. The Conservatives were flatlining, its leaders becalmed and its backwoodsmen anxious. The Liberal Democrats were heading to Brighton with an ineffectual leader who had long outlived his political usefulness, facing an election that could have wiped them out as a serious political force.

Remember what happened next? David Cameron gave the speech of his life, the Liberal Democrats got themselves out of jail thanks to a new, charismatic leader, and a week later Gordon Brown activated Labour’s self-destruct mechanism.

Happily, an exact repeat of that terrible hat-trick is now impossible. I fully expect David Cameron to give the most accomplished conference speech of the three leaders – he is always at his best in a crisis – but words alone can’t save prime ministers in the way they can opposition leaders, and his speech will be overshadowed by Boris Johnson’s in any case. Replacing Nick Clegg with Vince Cable is like repainting a car with a missing engine – it will look better, but it still won’t go anywhere. The Labour movement still shows an unnerving fondness for own goals, but even Ed Miliband’s harshest critic would concede that he is not Gordon Brown. Nevertheless, this could be the month when the pattern of politics shifts decisively in favour of the Conservatives.

Why? Because the Tories have only ever been one U-turn away from victory.  Yes, the Westminster whispers about how divided the coalition is, about fractious backbenchers and a surging mayor of London are part of the problem, but the real reason why Cameron is flatlining is because no one’s had a raise for two years and everyone’s worried about their job. Things will get worse before they get better; the deepest cuts are yet to come. Whether or not the economy is in a technical recession or not, the coalition’s programme isn’t working. But a round of stimulus spending could still save the British economy, and with it, the Conservatives.

Think it couldn’t happen? Yes, George Osborne will never stand up in the Commons and announce the end of austerity. But look closely at what the Tories have been saying since the reshuffle. The third runway doesn’t make sense as an aviation policy – China is building airports across the country, says the Department for Transport, let’s build half an airport in London – but it does make sense as stimulus to the ailing construction industry. Equally, while the phrase ‘the conservatory-led boom’ is likely to join ‘a welcome intervention from Aidan Burley’ on the list of phrases that will never be written in a history book, it’s the first time that the Conservatives have talked about stimulating economic activity with anything other than another round of expensive and fruitless quantitative easing.

The Tories are trying to create the space to present a programme of stimulus as continuity, not change, and to reap the political rewards when the economy starts growing again. They could hide an £80bn injection of capital off the books and maintain the fiction that the deficit reduction programme is working. They could still pull off an unlikely renaissance. Labour has to use the next month to explain what ‘stimulus’ would look like, or risk waking up to find that October 2012 looks horribly like October 2007.

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Stephen Bush writes a weekly column for Progress, the Tuesday review, and tweets @stephenkb

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Photo: Conservatives